I have been having no end of problems with my outbound email messages sent by my Drupal sites since I switched from shared hosting to VPS hosting. A typical shared host offers a well configured SMTP server with documentation about how to configure the MX and SPF records. On the other hand, a VPS requires the administrator to install and configure the mail transfer agent, which can be surprisingly complex.

After many years of using traditional desktop environments like Gnome 2 and KDE and XFCE, I recently spent a few months with Ubuntu 13.04. Overall, my experience with the Unity desktop was fairly positive after I tweaked and configured it to my liking. Since then, I’m using a different non-Ubuntu based distribution, so I’m currently using Mate 1.6. Probably the feature that I most miss from Unity is the launcher. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Unity launcher was so useful and intuitive for me, since I have never been particularly fond of keyboard navigation.

Given the fact that many computer users spend many hours every day, if not the better portion of their waking hours staring at a computer screen, it’s surprising how few users seem to pay attention to the quality of font rendering. I frequently read Linux distro reviews, and rarely if ever do they mention font rendering quality. For me, a heavy computer user, top-notch font rendering is the most important feature after system stability.

What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editors for Drupal are abundant. Good ones are not. Most WYSIWYG editors for Drupal produce messy markup and don’t respect the site’s CSS theme. Additionally, many of them don’t integrate well with Drupal and cause problems on certain browsers. Worse yet, almost none of them work on Apple and Android tablets and smartphones. There are a few decent WYSIWYG editors for Drupal that can produce decent markup if the writer uses the tool properly.

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It’s been a long time since I visited my site’s Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) settings page. I was happy to see that in 2012 Google apparently added a new option to sort results by date, as well as site image searching. This should be a real boon for users. But at the same time, I noticed that under the Look and Feel settings, it now says that the iFrame display method is deprecated.

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Every web developer dreams of seeing his sites finally “going big”. After months or even years of setup, configuration, content creation, bug-fixing, and digital sweat, patience is often rewarded with an influx of new visitors and signups… only to be followed by an error similar to this one:

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A user once asked me, “If you did it all over again, what CMS would you use?” That’s a good question. I honestly don’t consider myself to be an authority on the subject, but I’d like to share my experience with Drupal 6 as my CMS for a forum site during the past few years.